If, on the other hand, your work involves mainly pressing OK or Cancel in modal system dialogs, then you are right.
However, one that is retina-aware can make decisions about UI element sizing that takes into account the screen being much more readable at small sizes. I am at WWDC and have seen the actual hardware cycling screenshots of the retina-enabled Final Cut UI, and they appear to be doing exactly this -- the screen just feels bigger than a naive 1440x900 screen doubling would accomplish.
Additionally, for any application whose content is tied to the font size of the content (think text editors, terminals, IDEs, etc), simply lowering said font size will directly increase the amount one can see on the same sized screen.
With that said, please explain to me how I am mistunderstanding screen real estate.
http://applesliced.com/ask/how-do-i-increase-the-system-font...
Maybe Mountain Lion will change that?
If you want to use smaller fonts, use smaller fonts.
Is this really hard to figure out?
It's a bigger screen physically. It has, by any definition, more real-estate. That it is smaller in terms of relative pixels is absolutely meaningless.
Once you get >200DPI the whole idea of "pixels" becomes meaningless. It's simply about screen area. The limiting factor for small text on most screens is pixels because below a certain size they become unreadable. This is why people generally buy bigger screens: more pixels, more readable text.
At 220DPI it's pretty much always readable until it's too small to discern any more.